Research

Dr. Morgan has recently published in the journal, English Studies in Canada (ESC), on the re-activation of seventeenth-century English, particularly that of Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), in prose fiction by the German writer, W.G. Sebald (1944-2001). She has published in Lumen on Laurence Sterne’s eighteenth-century novel, Tristram Shandy, and on novelistic prose in early modern natural philosophy by the clergyman Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) and the physician Walter Charleton (1619-1707). An article on materialism, economics, and genre in work by the comic playwright Thomas D’Urfey (1653-1723) is under review, and is projected as the first chapter of a book-length study of D’Urfey’s prose, drama, and poetry.

Dr. Morgan continues research on the formal and historical significance of an early eighteenth-century novel by Nicolas Mavrocordatos, Grand Dragoman (Chief Translator) of the Ottoman Porte of Istanbul from 1700-1709. Les Loisirs de Philothée was written in Phanariot Greek and translated into French only as recently as 1989. No English translation exists, though Mavrocordatos’ novel responds to similar conditions that produced the English novel of the period, and there is archival evidence of the author’s friendship and correspondence with William Wake, an English scholar of Greek who later became Archbishop of Canterbury.

Dr. Morgan is currently completing a manuscript of documentary fiction that contributes to the field and discourse of Cultural Studies, and draws on her earlier study, published in the journal Mosaic, of the poetry of Andrew Suknaski.